Bing Says Links Are Still Important For Rankings

I had to chuckle at this story.

Bing, a small search engine, used by about 15 people at the last count*, has said that links are still important for rankings.

In other news, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and set in the west. It will be brighter than the night.

I am intrigued, however, by where Bing might go with voice search and who they might go there with.

Click the link to read the revelations of the century.

*The Bing User Group meet every Tuesday in the clubhouse.

#SEO #SEONews #Bing #Links #LinkBuilding

Summary:

• Remember Bing? Well, their European Marketing Manager has said that links are still important for ranking.
• But that they will decrease over time somewhat as “personalisation and user context take over”, especially for local search.
• All this will be based on big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence no doubt.

Actions to take:

1. Keep creating content which will attract links. Links are not going away anytime soon.
2. Keep building / generating / acquiring quality, editorial links, with varied anchor text.
3. Think about whether you think Bing will actually make a success of contextual search or not.
4. Click here to contact me to discuss creating links in a sustainable manner.

Discussion:

Honestly, sometimes I feel like the search engines are disappearing up their own fundament. They hate links, but considering they are the building blocks of the web, they cannot get away from using them in their algorithms.

Instead, they’d love to use cohort led contextual algorithms to decide what it relevant at a point in time, or place in the world. They’d love to, but they know that would produce utter rubbish results for users, since most cohorts tend to get dominated by a banal majority who may or may not be right.

You just have to look at the quality of adverts you are served to know that cohort led search results would be terrible. If they can’t get something right which is back-pocket critical, what makes you think they would get it right for the front pocket?

Still, it makes for good PR and gets Bing mentioned again, so objective achieved.

I am interested in Bing’s take on Voice search, however. When Facebook, or Amazon want to take on voice search, outside of their own narrow confines, I wonder where the technology and results will come from. Makes you wonder, eh?

More info:

• Bing Video Interview
• H/T SE Land
• SEO Mid-2017: AI & Machine Learning

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We recently released the super-exciting The State of SEO in mid-2017. Read it now.

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• Links are still important, so says the Man from Bing.
• Contextual search would be lovely, if it wasn’t so rubbish.
• Carry on building links.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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